Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

sacred music. The Singing Club also purchased a bass viol, likely used to assist their
singing in much the same way as the Amherst College Choir used their own viol. 124
The next group to appear after the Singing Club would prove to be Harvard’s
most long lasting and ultimately most influential musical institution, still in existence
today under the name of the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra. Despite its present high
reputation, it had quite humble beginnings. In March, 1808, a small group of students
joined together to establish a society dedicated to their “mutual improvement in
instrumental music.” Voting to call themselves the Pierian Sodality (in reference to the
Pierian Spring of Greek mythology, sacred to the Muses as a metaphorical source of art
and science), 125 the group soon gathered enough members to give instrumental serenades
to the college community. By August the Sodality decided it had practiced enough to
give a full performance, and voted to accept an offer to play music at an upcoming
literary exhibition. Consisting only of wind and brass instruments and playing almost
solely simple marches and other light works, the group was similar to a small martial
band.
The instrumental tradition represented by the Sodality (as well as by Amherst’s
own Paean Band) originally sprang from military musical practices. After the American
Revolution the size of the new country’s armed population was drastically reduced. In an
effort to maintain the country’s military strength, Congress passed a law in 1792
requiring all able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-five to join their state militia.
Every battalion required its own field band, which would play marches and other martial
songs to aid exercises and long marches. Many of these bands also gave public
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124 John Sullivan Dwight, “The Pierian Sodality,” 363.
125 The “Sodality” of Pierian Sodality merely means “brotherhood” or “society,” from the Latin “sodālitās.”
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